Wednesday, February 1, 2017

THE RETURN OF DAVID HOROWITZ & HIS CRUSADE TO DEFUND CPB

If you were working
in public broadcasting in the mid 1990s, you’ve heard of David Horowitz. He was
the guru of the Republican effort to defund the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting (CPB). Horowitz was the author of Sen. Bob Dole’s “Big Bird”
speech that caused chills at the 1993 Public Radio Conference in Washington,
DC. Now he is back, courtesy of President Donald Trump and the man who has been
called “Trump’s Brain,” Steve Bannon.

As you probably
know, Bannon is/was the publisher of Breitbart News Network [link], the
alt-right center of “alternative facts.” One of Breitbart’s primary thinkers
and writers is David Horowitz.

How close are
Horowitz and Steve Bannon? In November just after the election Horowitz wrote
an op-ed titled “Steve Bannon: Civil Rights Hero” [link] for the Breitbart site:

“I can’t say enough about
Donald Trump and his general, Steve Bannon.When the history of the 21st
Century civil rights movement is written Steve Bannon’s name will have a
special place in its pantheon of heroes.”

What many people
don’t know about Horowitz is that some of his angst against CPB was caused by
his own failure to become a successful public radio program host.

SECOND
THOUGHTS AT KCRW

In May 1992, KCRW GM Ruth Hirschman (who later
changed her name to Ruth Seymour) offered Horowitz a weekly program on KCRW in
Los Angeles.Hirschman felt public
broadcasting needed conservative voices to help change the perception that NPR had
a left wing bias.

According to the Los
Angeles Times [link], on May 15, 1992 Horowitz’s program Second Thoughts debuted. The program’s name came from the title of
the book "Destructive Generation:
Second Thoughts About the '60s. The book’s author was Peter Collier, one of
Horowitz's business partners.

Second Thoughts focused on what Horowitz perceived as the
pervasive influence of leftists and liberals in American culture. House Speaker Newt Gingrich had launch an assault on public broadcasting.

At the time I was
Director of News at American Public Radio (now Public Radio International) in
Minneapolis. I was often the first point of contact for producers seeking to
have their programs distributed by APR.

Ruth Hirschman
contacted me in an effort to get APR to promote and distribute Second Thoughts.Hirschman told me she was trying to
"placate the people who want to abolish public broadcasting" by
putting Horowitz on the air.

I listened to
several sample programs and they were truly awful. Horowitz had a terrible
radio voice, a whiny, menacing wail, that was certain to drive listeners away. Every
edition of the show sounded the same: Public broadcasting is a subsidiary of
the Democratic Party. Topics that I heard in the sample shows included:

Why does NPR hype the Black Panthers?

Why are none of senior figures at NPR
conservatives?

Why does PBS keeping attacking white people?

Second Thoughts spewed the same “alternative facts” that
Breitbart News does today.

I told Ruth
Hirschman that there was no way APR would be associated with Second Thoughts.
The problem was not its politics, it was how it sounded. She passed this along to Horowitz, who she said was livid about the criticism. Reportedly, he still stews about the denial of a national platform.

Second Thoughts
continued on KCRW for a couple of years before Horowitz got bored and ended the
program without a whimper.